shads
@shads@leminal.space
- Comment on Anti-government violence is growing. The response needs to be more than just increased policing 2 weeks ago:
It’s a fictional concept. Because it does rely on fantastically well integrated computers. But basically every matter of public interest gets loaded into a collectively accessible network that then sends out regular broadcasts with matters up for voting. Since the people in this scenario have networked implants they are constantly being polled for input on matters that match the criteria they have predefined. For a society changing decision it will surface for everyone, the more niche the topic the smaller the pool of people who are interested enough to venture an opinion. It would rely on universal acceptance of tech and some truly staggering intelligent systems to assess and surface matters that meet the thresholds of interest for each individual. Anything not explicitly prohibited is up to personal discretion until it becomes a matter that prompts a vote and is legislated. It would be a crazy system to live under for the first few years and would gradually become more livable. Also even in this fictional scenario the need for people to safeguard the sanctity of the voting apparatus is recognised and bad actors are anticipated.
As far as setting up an anarchic state I just don’t see it scaling particularly well. Homogenous ideologically aligned groups would seem eminently workable but what happens when you get a group that wants to live in a way that is morally antithetical to the overall community? A sect of people who want to live under an authoritarian dictatorship for example, are their wishes invalid because they don’t align with the larger social zietgeist? Who gets to enforce their will upon them? Who polices the worst extremes of this sort of self selected community to ensure that the only people it encompasses are those who have given their free and informed consent? Is the autonomy of the community embraced, supported, tolerated or ignored by its neighbours? How does it stave off the worst depredations of capitalist cultures it competes with, as soon as a collectivist culture emerges it is treated as an existential threat by any and all capitalists until it is destroyed or co-opted. Like I said I am not opposed to any of this, the worst excesses of the “Free Market Economy” are only going to make life worse for everyone over the next few decades and I believe that as a species we will need to come up with better ways to live. But I can’t help but feel we are going to see more to achieve that from violent uprising and political unrest than from any aspirational peaceful movements or demonstrations of a better path forward. Also alternative governmental structures are going to need to become a lot more approachable to Joe public. Right now a lot of more mainstream people are put off by the people who are advocating for change. It is after all a lot easier to pick up on the real or imagined hypocrisy and double standards of people who you don’t align with ideologically, such is the clannish nature of human beings.
- Comment on Anti-government violence is growing. The response needs to be more than just increased policing 2 weeks ago:
Democratic Anarchy, it is a system that would rely on a couple of generational leaps in computers and mind machine interfaces before we could even aspire to it. Nowhere near as appealing as the Culture would be, but also only dependent on moderately Clarke tech computers not massively Clarke tech.
Anyway I’m not defeatist, more just realistic. This guy would fall pretty squarely into the capitalist bootlicking Libertarian camp. He only really responds to violence (or the threat thereof) as motivation, in other words your typical boomer small business owner. He is never going to comply without some form of threat to back things up.
Its great to be idealistic, but I sincerely doubt we will see change in my life time, or that of my kids. We as a species are wired to listen to the ape that shrieks the loudest too much.
- Comment on Anti-government violence is growing. The response needs to be more than just increased policing 2 weeks ago:
My example? That there are people who refuse to act rationally or reasonably? This was someone who needed an intervention from an authority to motivate him to act in a way that cost him nothing but that he was ideologically opposed to.
Governments are always going to have a strong advantage against other frameworks that seek to decentralise power, trying to overthrow a centralised power structure is likely to be extremely violent and bloody. We aren’t there yet.
I have read Alastair Reynolds and I would love to be a Demarchist, but I don’t see that being feasible in the forseeable future.
- Comment on Anti-government violence is growing. The response needs to be more than just increased policing 2 weeks ago:
But we kinda do. Because you can’t expect people to act reasonably or rationally.
I know a guy, let’s call him Bob, who got a warning from the police for aggressively looming over a man at the supermarket who was wearing a mask and trying to maintain healthy social distance.
Because Bob didn’t believe in masks or social distancing he percieved that behaviour as the other person being judgemental of him. When the other guy, rather reasonably, pointed out that he has cancer and didn’t want Bob, who was wearing his mask over his chin at the time, to be so close to him, the confrontation was on.
Bob still maintains to this day that he was just standing up for his rights as an Australian…
He is also firmly of the belief that Anthony Albanese is a traitor to the country and that John Howard is the best Prime Minister we have ever had…
- Comment on "We're building an army:" Angry anti-renewable groups take to city streets ahead of state election 3 weeks ago:
Not to mention a lot of the farmers who are most up in Arms could be making a tidy profit off setting up shop on their land. Plenty of studies find that solar panels create useful micro climates under them that can yield some super positive results. I’d link to some of the articles but I am lazy and a hack, so I won’t.
- Comment on How did Google win the search engine war? 4 weeks ago:
Prioritising search with the right result almost always on the first page. Stripped back interface. Back in the day search engines could be and often were a crapshoot, then along comes Google and surfaces what you are after first time the vast majority of times you used it. Plus the Google search page was a logo a text box and 2 buttons, you had to go looking for a weather report, a stock ticker, a news feed, an entertainment feed, etcetera etcetera. It was the disruptive tech upstart, now it’s the incumbent, basically all the evangelist algorithm nerds took their stock options and bailed. Now we have advertising obsessed business majors and cryptobros piloting the zombie husk of Google around.
- Comment on How I wanna die 4 weeks ago:
Well of course you do. You little scamp.
- Comment on How I wanna die 4 weeks ago:
It’s Lemmy so I feel compelled to ask, you want to die as Henry Cavill watching Kevin Costner get chocked out by an anime chick? As Kevin Costner being choked out an anime chick while Henry Cavill watches? Or as an anime chick choking out Kevin Costner while Henry Cavill watches?
- Comment on 'tis the season 5 weeks ago:
The vision is there too, immanently doable to set up. You could shoot this very shot with a barely functional camera 5 bucks of supplies and 15 minutes to set up and get the shot.
Such a waste.
- Comment on Labor's NDIS reform plan has hit a stumbling block in Queensland 1 month ago:
And yet my father in law berates me regularly for calling the Liberals the party of policy navel gazers and economic retreat. He spent years bitching about Labor being in power, cheered when they lost power to the Liberal shitheels and can never name a single policy that benefits him. I really do wonder if there is a threshold for how much shit these people will take as long as their team is winning.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I always thought the decision was made a lot earlier than that. Wasn’t it largely due to Westinghouse that America settled on 60hz 110v? Where AEG pushed 50hz 220v in Europe? That was late 1800s early 1900s from memory. World war 2 may have resulted in some rebuilding but they rebuilt along lines that were already established, the bump up to 230-240v with time and gained efficiencies is mirrored in the US with the move towards 120v at least that’s what I recall, but I must admit that outside of some Technology Connections videos I haven’t delved too deeply in recent years (and yes I know Alec would say the US technically already sends 240v but that’s not what your general appliances are rated to).
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Takes a couple of litres of water before we get hot water. I have filled the kettle twice before the water was too hot to hold my hand under before. That’s roughly 3.5 litres of water just to get to the hot stuff. Luckily boiling water was a key consideration in our voltage level (actually that’s something I made up on the spot 😜) but more power equals good so… Its weird that this is a field that the US apparently just decided to let a large portion of the world be more “powerful” almost expect that if there were parts of the world settling on 240v the US would arbitarily decide they needed 500v.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Different country and all, but both are 240v in my neck of the woods, and since I live on tank water with mains water supply as a back up. Coupled with what I believe may be the most circuitous route from hot water cylinder to kitchen tap on earth (3 meters point to point yet seeming out to the local post office and back based on how long it takes to get hot water out of the tap) we use the Dishwasher to heat our water.
Which is all a very verbose way of saying “It depends on your circumstance…”
- Comment on Australia wants more data centres. A disagreement over power sources stands in the way 2 months ago:
Just like radium has (a very few) legitimate uses, so do LLMs. Stop using them as a thought/research replacement and use it sparingly. Natural language processing for instance is a good use. But it should never be feeding that into another LLM to action the speech it has interpreted and taking all agency away from humans IMHO.
- Comment on Australia wants more data centres. A disagreement over power sources stands in the way 2 months ago:
I’m comparing LLM based “AI” to radium. The data centres are just the paint factories in this analogy.
- Comment on Australia wants more data centres. A disagreement over power sources stands in the way 2 months ago:
Imagine being someone who distrusted radium in 1900. Trying to understand this outrageous desire to shove poison into every product under the sun. Watching people literally brushing their teeth with it. Knowing how horrifically bad it was going to turn out.
Fucking capitalism never misses a chance to fuck people over. In a couple of years time when we are all in the AI hangover it’s going to be curious to see how many people “knew all along” AI was a fantastically bad idea.
I know the data centres can be repurposed for other tasks once they don’t need that density of compute, but what a waste.
Oh and before any sheep start bleating about how it’s just a tool, and you can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle…
Fuck off.
You willingly embrace the cognitive damage machine I will be maintaining my stance of “Fuck AI” and unless you have a background in neuroscience (and can post your credentials) I will likely be as unconvinced by your bullshit as the last hundred of your ilk who have fed me the same shitty rationalisations.
- Comment on Pauline Hanson vows to slash cigarette prices by nearly $30 a pack 2 months ago:
Given the other fucked up things she would do to the country if she got any power, cheap darts will be the least of our problems. If she even does it, rather than promising to and then being told after the election that promise wasn’t actually funded and Gina doesn’t want it, so tough luck.
- Comment on One of Australia's most senior Catholic figures convicted of sexual abuse crimes 2 months ago:
Yeah, but luckily Pauleen has declared Australia a Judeo-Christian nation. So we are going to have fuckhead racist white supremacist scum acting as apologists for the churches. It’s weird how we don’t get to have personal privacy or data security in the name of protecting the children, but they won’t put churches on a watch list don’t you think?
- Comment on Jailed whistleblower David McBride walks free after becoming eligible for parole 2 months ago:
Probably far less for David than for the rest of us.
- Comment on 130,000 people: One Nation clarifies plan for major migration cut 2 months ago:
Yep, sink the country and send us into debt, tank businesses. But on the plus side we get to have another few years of insufficiently taxing billionaires and corporations while they steal all our data and turn the country into a giant network of datacenters that other parts of the world view as warmly as a wet damp fart on an elevator.
All so her “base” can feel emboldened to express the racism that sits at the core of their being like a festering, weeping fistula of pure evil.
What a pack of fucking idiots.